What are some good examples of sustainable building materials? Maintaining sustainable buildings requires some commitment on the part of the homeowner. Oh, there are lots of them! There are woods that are...
Oh, there are lots of them! There are woods that are sustainable, and there are woods that aren't sustainable. It just depends on how they're grown and harvested and the awareness that's put into that. Bamboo is a very sustainable product. It's very renewable. Much of it has to do with the way things are grown and treated.
I think the most sustainable material is clay. You don't really change it when you harvest it. It stays clay. You can use it for adobe bricks or cob or plasters and it stays the same, so it's totally recyclable when its life cycle is complete. All that's been added to it is sand and maybe straw. So it stays in that organic state and it will just compost over a long time and melt back into the earth as clay soil. That to me is the most sustainable material there is. There are cob buildings in Wales, a very wet place, that are 400 years old. They've just been maintained.
One of the big fears in our culture is having to maintain things. We're set up to not have time for maintenance. Everyone wants something that's maintenance-free and there's no such thing. You're going to have to pay for it in some way. You'll either pay for it upfront or on the long end, or you'll think you're never going to have to maintain something and then you'll wind up having to replace it before its life cycle should be complete. There are all kinds of issues with that. Concrete is the only exception I know of. It really is a miracle product. If you use it correctly, it really is low-maintenance. A metal roof is low maintenance if you use it correctly.
A lot of natural building, though, is high maintenance. Adobe and lime plasters, for instance, are exposed on the outside, so every year or so, you have to put a lime wash on it. That's why the buildings in Wales are still standing after 400 years. It's just their tradition that every year or two, they go out with a bucket of limewater and a scrub brush and scrub their houses with this limewater and it puts another light coating of lime on there to make it able to withstand the elements. In Wales, they have a culture that has supported that sort of ritual for centuries. It's just part of their routine.
But we have a TV to watch and cars to drive, so we don't have time to do that. So we're always looking for ways to avoid maintenance, and most of them don't involve anything that's sustainable. We use more plastics, more systems that are costly and more materials that require a lot of energy upfront in order to not have to be maintained. Vinyl siding is an example of a low maintenance material - you don't have to paint it or mess with it at all. A lot of dioxin is produced in its manufacture, and that's an extremely toxic substance with virtually no use. There's very little you can do with dioxin. Lots of it is produced as a byproduct of polyvinylchloride, which is what vinyl siding is made of. There's a great documentary on vinyl siding called "Blue Vinyl" that you might be able to rent from a video store. It will blow your mind.
